Planning an internal audit of your marketing strategy? This is a good way to optimize your marketing and to spot any potential weak spots. But if you’re new to performing a marketing audit, or you haven’t performed a marketing audit for this particular marketing strategy, you may find yourself unsure of where to start. Here are a few of our tips for a successful marketing audit:

Make Your Audit Comprehensive

There might be one or two things that you’re more worried about than others as the audit begins. However, if you plan to conduct a marketing audit, it’s important to be as comprehensive as possible. Include all aspects of your marketing practices, strategy, and marketing team. However, if you have a massive marketing practice, you can conduct smaller audits for each category, such as digital marketing audits or SEO audits.

The point of an audit is not just to confirm issues you were already worried about, but rather to show you weak spots that may have escaped your notice. Without a comprehensive audit, you may not be able to do this.

Know Your Goals For Your Audit

Your audit should be comprehensive. That said, you also need to know what you want out of your audit. What issues are you looking for? Compliance? A lack of responses to your marketing strategy? Justifying the marketing budget? Setting your goals for your audit is the first step that you should take in creating any marketing audit. This will help to inform your performance indicators and the overall results of your audit. Keep your goals at the center of your audit at all times.

Create a Documented, Impartial Structure Before Beginning

Your audit must be unbiased. This is the only way to ensure that you receive the fullest, most helpful assessment possible. The problem is that everyone has biases, even biases that they aren’t aware of. Auditors are not immune to bias.

If you structure your audit as you conduct it, you’re likely to get tripped up on those biases. That’s why you’ll want to create a systemic structure for the audit long before you actually need to conduct a marketing audit. This structure should fully document the process and should not be deviated from if you can help it.

Conduct Marketing Audits Regularly

If you want your marketing to be constantly optimized, you will need to conduct audits regularly. The industry is bound to change, as is your team, audience, and processes. By scheduling a yearly or quarterly audit, you can take those changes into account and get a current read on how your marketing is performing over time. Using the results of an audit from a few years ago can only ensure that you are operating on outdated, irrelevant information.

Look At Your Audience

In order to audit your marketing performance, you will need to take a look at your audience. What is effective for them right now? What are they responding to and not responding to? This should begin by looking at the ways your audience engages with your brand. But it shouldn’t stop there.

Do a little further market research, too, to look at the ways that your audience engages with advertising and marketing outside of your company. Is there anything that they typically don’t engage with that you’ve been using? Or any opportunity you’ve been missing out on? This could be a good time to create customer personas to use as a reference for your audience throughout your audit.

Look At Your Competition

Comparison is the thief of joy, they say…but in marketing, comparison with the competition is an essential part of measuring your performance. While conducting your audit, look at your competition, especially competitors who are successful in your industry. What are they doing right and what can you learn from them? This may help to highlight some of the things your marketing strategy is missing, and it’s easy to work into your marketing audit.

Know Where To Collect Information

An audit gives you a clear and objective assessment of your marketing process by gathering data and other pertinent information and evaluating that. You need to know where to collect that information for your marketing audit. This typically includes:

• Website dashboards
• Social media analytics
• Reports from your marketing team
• Marketing budget
• Ad metrics
• Marketing campaign performance

Once you have all of this information, you can go through it to slowly and objectively measure the performance of your marketing process. This audit can help you to make your marketing better in the future.